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Physiology and Psychology 
of Education 



PART I. 

Elementary Education 

George P. Brown 



PUBLIC-SCHOOL PUBLISHING COMPANY 
Bloomington, Illinois 



Copyright igo8 

by 

George P. Brown 



>, 



LIBRARY of C0Ntii^£3S| 
Two Copies ReceivbC' 

JAN 4 1908 

__ ao»»yri«ni tntry 
CLASS A XXc. Wu= 
COPY B. 



ft. ' 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 

PAGE. 

Foreword • - 5 

Personality and the Machine . . . 7 

Psychology of the Object . : '. . . . lo 

How does Personality Create Language? 14 

The Physiology of Speech 20 

Method of Using the Machine 27 

Method of Educating the Child 31 

Learning from the Printed Page 35 

How^ Knowledge Begets Knowledge 39 

The Commanding Purpose of the School 41 

Knowledge the Servant of the Personality 45 

Summary • • 5^ 



PHYSIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY 
OF ELEMENTARY EDUCATION 



FORE-WORD, 

The following- pages are offered as some of the 
bones of a skeleton around which may be built a sys- 
tem of education that is in accord with recent state- 
ments of physical and psychic science. 

Teaching has been slow to discover the inspiring 
suggestions which the doctrine of evolution is making 
to both the theory and the practice of education. The 
present theory and practice is essentially the product 
of the experience of former generations, in which dif- 
ferent views w^ere held from those more recently set 
forth, of the mutual relations of body and mind. The 
present outline is the outgrowth of the recent formu- 
lations by neurologists of the function of the brain in 
its relation to personality or ego. 

There is a disposition among some of those who 
are in the position of directors of the education of the 
young to declare that the main purpose of the school 
is the accumulation of an ordered body of knowledge 
— what they call a training of the mind. The teach- 
ings of this outline is that its purpose is the ordering 

5 



6 Elementary Education. 

of the activities of Heart, Hand, and Head — feeling, 
will, and intellect — at every step of the child's growth. 
It seeks, also, to set forth in some detail how the per- 
sonality and the nervous system work together in 
organizing a body of activities of feeling, will, and 
knowledge, and fusing them into character. It seeks 
to make clear that knowledge is not the sole or prin- 
cipal aim of education, but that knowledge, or mind, 
is, rather, the instrument which the personality con- 
structs and uses for the accomplishment of its ends. 
Mind is the servant of the Will and Heart, which latter 
are the free activity with which the self or person is 
endowed by the Creator. The personality can make no 
progress in its evolution without ordered knowledge, 
but knowledge is only a means to a higher end. 



ELEMENTARY EDUCATION. 
L 

Personality and the Machine 

A machine is energy that always acts in the same 
way, and its products are all determined for it. 

Free-Will is energy that determines its own pro- 
ducts and the methods of constructing them. 

The child is at birth a machine but endowed with 
the potency of achieving free-will. This endowment 
we name Personality or Ego. 

The human machine is the product of evolution 
from ''the beginning" until Personality emerged. The 
Chimpanzee or Gorilla is this machine in the highest 
stage of its evolution before Personality appeared. 
This evolution was of the nervous system. The brain 
of the Chimpanzee is in all essential particulars like 
that of man so far as the neurologist can discover. It 
is man's house built and furnished, awaiting its master. 
It is the machine which the personality is to use in 
achieving its freedom — in making actual what is at 
birth potential. 

This machine^ — the nervous system — when reduced 
to its lowest terms is what the physiologists call the 
sensori-motor cycle, which consists of an afferent 
filament — the sensory nerve, — a central cell, and an 
efferent filament called the motor nerve. The stimu- 



8 Elementary Education. 

Ills attacks the receiving end of the sensory nerve ; by 
this it is conveyed to the central cell ; this center trans- 
mits it to the motor or efferent nerve which executes 
what the cell orders. This is the sensori-motor cycle and 
the organization into a unity of a vast number of such 
motor cycles, which evolution has constructed, is the 
nervous system. Every motor cycle does one thing and 
does it always in the same way in response to one par- 
ticular stimulus. The cycle has nothing to do in deter- 
mining the stimulus. It is a machine, as defined above. 
There is no suggestion of freedom in it, and because 
there is not, the conviction has arisen in some minds 
that the personality is only a more complicated product 
of the nerve organism; that it is the nervous system 
that loves, and thinks, and resolves, instead of being 
the instrument by which the personality manifests love, 
and thought, and purpose. 

The personality sets to work early to fashion this 
machine to its purpose of achieving its own develop- 
ment. The instrument has the congenital endowment 
of its ancestors of the lower world, where personality is 
unknown. These are the instincts of self-preservation 
cf the individual and of the species; which instincts 
are found in some measure in all phases of lower life. 
In the highest animals there are prophesies of mental- 
ity, purpose, and desire, the instincts with which the 
child is endowed at birth. The first utterance of the 
conscious ego is will in the form of desire. The ani- 
mal's will is impulse. The distinction between impulse 
and desire marks the entrance of the ego, the self, into 
the stream of evolution. In impulse the will rushes 



Personality and the Machine. 9 

forth to appropriate the object before the sense. In 
desire the impulse is held in check, and the image of its 
realization is created, which remains when the object 
is no longer sensed. 

The child, as person, is will-as-desire when he first 
wakes to consciousness. As animal he is will as im- 
pulse. Desire and impulse may have the same end but 
with desire there opens a vista of world-wide differ- 
ence in the means to the end. 

With the coming of Personality there comes the 
possibility of a science of human psychology. 



IL 

Psychology of the Object. 

The Gorilla has a vague consciousness of ohjects 
as something other than itself which impulse pushes 
on to appropriate or avoid. 

The infant ego at an early age is conscious of his 
environment as object; he has separated the not self 
from the self; the thing perceived from the seer. He 
has the impulse to appropriate or avoid the object, like 
the animal, and he has, also, the desire through which 
the impulse may be inhibited and an image of the reali- 
zation of his desire be substituted for the percept of the 
object. This holding of the image as a motive to ac- 
tion when impulsive appropration is not practicable, is 
desire : It has in it the inherited impulse of the beast, 
and something new — the conscious inhibition of the 
impulse which may be executed in the future. 

What the child actually is in this first stage of de- 
veloping consciousness is will-as-desire, in so far as 
he is other than Chimpanzee or Gorilla. 

What he is potentially — so theistic evolution pro- 
claims — is unity with the will of the universe, oneness 
with the source of things. This unity is another name 
for freedom — that which is the commanding desire of 
the race and the increasing desire of every growing in- 
dividual. 

10 



Psychology of the Object. 11 

The school seeks to forward the reahzation of this 
potentiahty during the period of the child's formal ed- 
ucation. 

The child during the elementary and high school 
periods, thinks the object to be learned and the sub- 
ject who learns to be essentially different. So far m 
our progress in the art of teaching the teacher has taken 
the same attitude if not the same view. The child must 
take this view for he has no power to apprehend any 
other. 

The school seeks to lead the child into a knowledge 
of the object— the not-self— which is everywhere chal- 
lenging him to come into the mastery of it. The en- 
vironment is ever stimulating the personality to try 
conclusions with it. The school seeks to put order into 
these efforts of the learner by selecting for the school 
environment a course of study— that is, a system of 
related objects — which will inform him of those things 
he most needs to know, and will at the same time so 
order these that they shall become a key for unlocking 
what other knowledge of his environment he may need 
to acquire. The environment may be, therefore, of 
' any dimensions, from the school-room to that of the 
universe. 

The school leads into a knowledge of the thing to 
be learned by : 

First, apprehending it as a whole among other 
wholes, the object is seen as a mass; 

Second, the object is analyzed into its constituent 
parts or elements; which elements are now — 



12 Elementary Education. 

Third, reunited into a whole, arranged into an or- 
ganism of mutually related parts, resulting in a body 
of organized knowledge. The knowledge of an object 
is organized when the bringing of one of its parts into 
consciousness causes all the other parts to present 
themselves in their proper relations to each of the other 
parts and to the entire object. To present the blossom 
end of an apple causes all the other parts to immedi- 
ately arrange themselves into an image of an apple. 

This is knowing the object as object, or not-self: 
The process and result are viewed as something ob- 
jective and other than the personality that views them. 

The processes of the schools in bringing the learner 
into a knowledge of the object differ widely, but they 
generally have a unifying strand of purpose and method 
of which the teaching body as a whole is vaguely aware. 
They all have their faces set toward giving the child 
freedom in his environment, and yet their efforts fre- 
quently result in riveting his chains more firmly. This 
latter commonly results from the high regard the 
school has for the child as a machine, and the small 
importance it attaches to the will-as-desire as a free 
energy in its efforts to educate itself. 

As has been said, the child when it enters conscious 
life is imll as desire in so far as it is other than Chim- 
panzee. It is Chimpanzee plus zvill as desire. This 
feeling-will is the free native force which drives on 
the child, and, indeed, most mature men and women, 
in all those efforts in which personal initiative is re- 
quired. It is the point of contact between the thing 
to be done and the doer in all positively educative pro- 



Psychology of the Object. 13 

cesses of the young. Inhibitory acts are educative 
when they negate negative acts. But the best inhibi- 
tory acts are the educative acts that are affirmative, so 
far as they are prompted by will as desire. The best 
way to arrest a negative act is to substitute for it a 
positive. Let the "don'ts" be few, and the incitements 
to do the educative thing be many and strong. 

We will return later in this series to a considera- 
tion of a third stage of our psychological growth which 
gives us a radically different conception of the object 
from the one presented above. But we need first to 
trace the process by which the personality, acting un- 
der the lead of desire, develops, in the elementary 
school, toward manhood and womanhood on its jour- 
ney toward its ultimate freedom. 



The personality when it first emerges comes into 
possession of the inheritance which has come to it 
fiom the lower world, but with endowments to w^hich 
the Chimpanzee is blind; for example, the power to 
create objects, such as images of things and events. 
These are subjective objects for which he must make 
objective signs or symbols, such as gestures, sounds, 
pictures, and eventually words. Without language he 
could make little more progress than the Chimpanzee. 
With language he has been able to come into mastery 
first of nature, and then of himself and of the creations 
of the human race which have preceded him. 



-3 



IIL 

How Does Personality Create Language? 

The child perceives an object as external through 
the direct stimulus of the object upon the sensory sys- 
tem. 

The child also creates images of these objects which 
images he views as internal objects in contrast with the 
perception of them as external. By means of these 
images he is able to organize objects into groups and 
classes. The Feeling-Will is the creative energy which 
not only re-creates the external world through percep- 
tion, but it creates for itself an internal, an image 
world, a counter-part of the world of external sense. 

The personality is born with creative power and 
desire. The commanding impulse brought up from 
below, is self-preservation. The desires prompt to ef- 
fort, and the mind or knowledge points out the road 
to achievement. This is the psycho-cycle in the per- 
sonality corresponding to the motor-cycle in the body. 
The inner life is a system of psycho-cycles. 

Will as desire creates images of sense objects 
which it organizes into related groups. These images 
and groups of images are the ideas the child first forms. 
He seeks to express these ideas. Before man had cre- 
ated a language, he evidently used sounds and ges- 
tures. The hand, and face, and voice were the instru- 

14 



How Does Personality Create Language f 15 

ments employed. Different sounds and gestures be- 
came signs of dift'erent thoughts and ideas : finally 
the word was made. But we need not suppose that 
these sounds were imitations of some attribute of the 
object. Such imitations were, no doubt, used in some 
measure, but neither the ''bow-wow" nor the "pooh- 
pooh" theory will explain the source of the language 
of any race. The languages were rather each a crea- 
tion by different and widely separate groups of men 
which grew into common use in each group as all cus- 
toms grow. The need of the multiplication of these 
signs grew as new ideas arose, but for a long time 
these signs performed the function of nouns or verbs 
or adjectives, though each may have represented an 
entire thought. 

The personality, being an ego and not a beast, be- 
gan to form judgments which were expressed, little 
by little, by single words or a combination of these 
which afterwards became distinguished as verbs, nouns, 
and adjectives, etc. A judgment was expressed by a 
noun or by a verb or by an adjective, according as 
either of these ideas was prominent in the meaning. 
It was certainly long before the three elements in the 
judgments were recognized — the subject, the predicate, 
and the copula. Symbols were multiplied only as it 
became necessary to express the meaning with greater 
clearness. These symbols must be fixed by repeated 
use, and the brain was the storehouse provided. 

Every brain is two brains, each the duplicate of the 
other, and each having all the endowments of the 
Chimpanzee. 



16 Elemeniary Education. 

The right lobe is the center of the voluntary sen- 
sori-motor-cycles of the left side of the body, and the 
left lobe performs the same office for the right side. 
The ego begins to collect its library of language sym- 
bols in the left lobe in all right-handed persons. This 
is, probably, because the right hand is first used to 
express ideas by gestures. In left-handed persons the 
library is collected in the right lobe. Why the library 
is not collected in both lobes is not explained by neu- 
rologists except as here suggested. But the fact seems 
established that only one lobe of the brain is used for 
language symbols for either the sense of hearing or of 
sight; for either speech or music; or for knowledge 
of any kind. If these language centers in the left brain 
are destroyed by paralysis in childhood, it is possible 
for the ego to educate the right brain to perform their 
functions because of the plastic condition of the brain ; 
but if this catastrophe happens in mature age, the per- 
son remains as ignorant of words as a chimpanzee, for 
the rest of his life. 

These are facts which, the neurologists declare, 
have become established as scientific truth. 

The above indicates what is the raw material for 
the construction of the language machine, which the 
ego must use to promote his advance toward knowledge 
and freedom. We need to always bear in mind that 
the personality at birth is Will; and that education 
seeks to promote the development of this will into 
free-will. Will is a self-active and a creative energy 
which must achieve its own freedom through its own 
self-discipline. The school's function is to select the 



lloiv Does Personality Create Lanyuufje? 17 

environment which will best stimulate the self-disci- 
pline of the child. This self-discipline must be pro- 
moted pari passu with the construction of the machine 
by which it is to be realized. This machine is the edu- 
cated brain, and especially the brain educated in lan- 
guage. 

The cerebro-cycles must be educated by the same 
process that all the other motor cycles of the nervous 
system are educated: viz., by persistent repetition. 
The response must be made to instantly follow the 
afferent stimulus and by the same motor channel. The 
commanding function of the school in the beginning 
is to join the idea with its chosen w^ord. The young 
child does not distinguish between the idea and the 
symbol, for the same reason that he does not distin- 
guish between the object, rose, and its name; they are 
one and the same to him. The word, rose, becomes 
registered in the brain so that the consciousness of the 
object immediately stimulates the rose-cell in the brain 
to utter the word, rose, through the organs of speech, 
or through the muscles of the hand. This fixing of 
the word, rose, in the brain is a purely mechanical pro- 
cess. The immediate and complete establishment of 
the cycle is secured by the working of the zuill as de- 
sire in making the connection. A single intense im- 
pulse of will as desire is often sufficient to secure as 
by a shock what many repetitions with a passive desire 
may fail to fix. 

There is a small section of the brain no larger than 
a hazel-nut in the Broca convolution of the cerebrum, 
in which all the words which the most learned man 



18 Elementary Education. 

knows are registered for oral utterance. A leaking- 
blood-vessel in that small group of cells will instantly 
blot out all of these words from the person's oral vo- 
cabulary. There are other centers for written words 
('there is some evidence that the writing center is in 
the immediate vicinity of the speech center) and still 
others for music and the other arts. But all are liable 
to be destroyed by a blood clot while the other func- 
tions of the nervous system are performed as before. 

The matter of special interest to the teacher is that 
the personality creates and stores in the brain all these 
symbols as well as all his ideas, and it is the self who 
iises them and constructs by means of his language, 
not only his knowledge, but builds up his character un- 
der the leadership of his feelings. The primal source 
of ideals is feeling; and ideals may lead toward or 
away from the good and the true life. Ideals may be 
low or high. 

The teachings of modernism in science and religion 
lead to the conviction that the school has become the 
institution that must be looked to as the special agency 
for supplying the environment by which the develop- 
ing child shall prefer high ideals to low; that which 
is noble and manly to what is sinful or degenerating; 
the divine instead of the demonic; and that it shall 
secure to the child knowledge and intelligence that 
shall guide him toward this end most surely and di- 
rectly. Knowledge and intelligence are not the end, 
but they are essential means to the end, because the 
noblest ideals can never become formed or realized 
without knowledge and intelligence to direct in their 



Hotv Does Personality Create Language? 19 

pursuit. It is equally true that the most exalted knowl- 
edge and intelligence are as efficient servants in lead- 
ing in the pursuit of bad ends whenever the person- 
ality "knows better and does worse," and when the in- 
stincts and impulses that he brings with him from the 
nether life have arrested the growth of the human na- 
ture. Every personality is in a large measure what 
his environment in childhood and youth prompts him 
to become. As will the child is creative ; but its crea- 
tions are determined in large measure by its inher- 
ited impulses and its environment. The teach- 
er's anchor of hope is the conviction that this endow- 
ment called personality is of that higher nature that 
"looks up and not down, forward not backward, and 
lends a hand," whenever it is fully roused to action; 
that it is divine by nature, not demonic — positive and 
not negative. 



IV. 

THE PHYSIOIvOGY OF SPEE^CH. 

The mechanism for creating language has been de- 
scribed. We may now consider the process of lan- 
guage creation which it is the function of the school 
to direct. The process is both mechanical and free. A 
word is an idea (a meaning) and it is, also, an object- 
ive form. Its form is a mechanism, its meaning is a 
free creation by the personality under the influence of 
environment. The meaning is the essential thing, but 
without form (words) it would be of little value to 
the possessor, and of no value in practical life. 

Language was made by the race little by little as 
new ideas were created which called for new forms. At 
a later period one form was used as the sign of two or 
more related meanings. There are many more mean- 
ings in our language than there are different words to 
express them. 

This order in the original creation of forms as 
signs of meanings should be borne in mind by the 
school. It is the natural way of creating a language, 
and every child must create his own language under 
the influence of the environment. But the child has, 
also, a language environment, which he re-creates and 
registers in his library of words in the brain. 

The creative power, called imitation, is power of a 
lower grade. It would better be named re-creative 

20 



The Physiology of Speech. 21 

power, since it repeats a former creation. Imitation 
is a powerful instinct of the child which has been 
brought up from his animal ancestors. The tendency 
is easily established to create word-forms without fill- 
ing them with meanings, by the child's repeating his 
environment of language forms. This leads to the bad 
pedagogy of first creating forms to be filled with mean- 
ing later. There is an ancient injunction — "First form 
the mind and then fill it." It is the best educative pro- 
cess to supply the form when the learner feels the need 
of it. It sometimes facilitates the progress of the 
learner, however, to move from the form to the mean- 
ing, especially in reading. The essential thing in build- 
ing up this mechanism is that the learner shall see the 
meaning in the form and the form in the meaning, the 
two becoming fused into one object. This union, as 
has been shown above, must be fixed by much repeti- 
tion. To fully appreciate how much repetition is re- 
quired the teacher should become familiar with Helen 
Keller's struggles as related by herself. Her experi- 
ence will awaken sympathy for the child in his struggle 
to make a language. 

But the school ought especially to stimulate the 
child to create ideas and new groupings of his ideas. 
This demands a rich environment and calls into action 
the imagination — the free creative power of the per- 
sonality which sets him ofif from the beast. Because of 
his images, the person seeks for verbal forms to give 
them utterance. These forms are both graphic and 
oral. The school must stimulate and put in order both 
of these kinds of utterance at the same time that it 

—4 



22 Elementary Education. 

stimulates and puts in order the imagery and the other 
psychic products that the personahty creates. 

We here find a basis for determining the method 
for teaching the mother tongue which is indeed the 
basis of method for every other subject of the curri- 
culum. 

If what has been presented in the preceding pages 
holds true in its essentials, we must conclude that the 
commanding purpose of the early years of school is to 
come into possession of the '^mother tongue" consid- 
ered both as to its content and its form. That is, these 
early years must be passed in an environment which is 
so ordered as to stimulate free and orderly mental 
products, and their utterance in free and well ordered 
English. When we estimate the magnitude of this 
task it becomes manifest that whatever else the school 
does in these years must be subordinate and, in the ele- 
mentary schools, incidental to this. 

The child's personality expends itself largely ( i ) in 
giving utterance to the creations of his imagination, 
and (2) in imitating — re-creating — utterances already 
made. Imagination and imitation are both creative ac- 
tivities. They are concerned wuth the field of external 
objects and with images of such objects. External and 
internal sense-perception furnishes the material for 
thinking, and the thoug^hts are simply the various 
groupings of these images and percepts into more com- 
plex space- wholes, or objects, and time- wholes, or 
events. Space and Time are the fundamental condi- 
tions of conscious life in this early period. Abstract 
notions, the combination of these into thought, and the 



The Physiology of Speech. 23 

relations of cause and effect, are apprehended but 
vaguely by the child below the high school. Cause 
and effect are seen merely as going before and coming 
after — a time sequence. Thought, in the true sense of 
the word, is impossible to such. To remember, in this 
stage of growth, is to recall images and collocate them 
into substance-wholes and events. 

When the teacher stops attempting to put herself 
into the child, that is, assuming that he can deal with 
abstract ideas, there will no longer be a gulf between 
her and a learner which she is wasting time in trying 
to fill by throwing into it what the child cannot com- 
prehend. The child is thinking on a lower level and 
to this his environment must correspond, and especially 
that part of it which is the teacher, if it shall be an edu- 
cative stimulus. 

The teacher should be ever alive to the fact that 
the child is a creative force, one of whose strongest im- 
pulses is to imitate (re-create) his environment both of 
things and words. But the child's impulse is also 
strong to create a new imaginary world of the ma- 
terial the senses bring in. The impelling force of the 
child's personality in re-creating and in creating in re- 
sponse to his environment, is self activity as desire, or 
interest, or curiosity; different names for practically 
the same thing. By repetition the child may become 
able to call words at sight without giving them any 
meaning. 

In her seventh year Helen Keller, who had been 
blind and deaf practically from birth, knew not a single 
word. Indeed she knew nothing except what she had 



24 Elementary Education. 

learned by touch, taste, and smell. She was subject to 
fits of great excitement, and sometimes of rage, for 
want of other expression of her feelings. She could 
not understand the meaning of the directions of oth- 
ers nor could they understand her. Her teacher. Miss 
Sullivan, arrived on March 6. She proceeded at once 
to teach the child words by a system of signals of 
touch. By March 31 Helen could make by strokes on 
her hand eighteen nouns and three verbs, but they 
meant nothing to her, although the object had been 
associated with the w^ords. She had spelled zvatcr 
many times, but it was only a succession of strokes. 
On April 5 while Helen was holding a mug under a 
faucet and the cold water was running over her hands, 
her teacher spelled w-a-t-e-r on the palm of her other 
hand. 

Miss Sullivan says : "She dropped the mug and 
stood as one transfixed. A new light came into her 
face. She spelled water several times." She had got- 
ten a word. From that moment her personality was 
set free. 

''The next morning Helen was like a radiant fairy. 
She flitted from object to object asking the name of ev- 
erything." She now had the key to the mystery of the 
world, for she had both the form and meaning of a 
word. Within three years she was beginning to learn 
articulate speech which she finally mastered through 
her finger tips applied to the lips and the throat of her 
teacher. 

It was not through the afTerent nerves of sight or 
of hearing, but through those of touch that the cells 



The Physiology of Speech. 25 

of language utterance in the Broca convolution of the 
brain were stimulated to action and vocal speech was 
registered there. The brain center of touch reactions 
has not yet been located. It may be as diffused in the 
brain as its afferent nerves are diffused throughout the 
body. But that it can be educated to register articulate 
speech in the speech center of the brain is demonstrated 
by the fact that those born deaf and blind can be taught 
to speak. 

The word-center of written language utterance is 
different from that of articulate speech. Some neurolo- 
gists claim to have located it near to and above the 
speech center. The meaning center is not the same as 
the sight or hearing center of words. The Broca con- 
volution is the oral utterance center. The meaning is 
registered in another part of the brain. 

Now who does all this registering of forms and 
meanings? It is the Will; the Self; the Personality; 
the Ego ; — different names of one source of activity. 
Each self inherits his brain tissue, but it is an empty 
mansion which the personality fits up for its own use 
and enlarges or modifies to meet emergencies. Note 
the wonderful modifications that must have been made 
by Helen Keller in forcing the touch nerves to perform 
the work of the ear and the eye in filling the Broca 
library. 

There is enough revealed by neurology — proven be- 
yond a reasonable doubt — to make clear to the open- 
minded investigator that the will, the personality, pre- 
pares the brain to be the instrument of his own ad- 



26 Elementary Education. 

vancement in knowledge and character. This Helen 
Keller has made clear. 

Is it not the great function of the school to help 
the child to fashion this instrument aright; so that 
every stroke shall count for knowledge, intelligence, 
and righteousness in the growing personality ? 

This brief reference to the physiology of speech will 
stimulate the inquiring teacher and parent who may 
read it to study such books as ''The Brain and Person- 
ality," by Dr. William Hanna Thomson ; published by 
Dodd, Mead, & Co., New York City. 



V. 



Method of Using the Machine. 
It is not the purpose of this booklet to do more than 
hint at the method which the school should follow ui 
fashioning the instrument of knowledge; and thought, 
and purpose, and heart, in a human life. 

The educated person is both a machme and a free 
agent He makes his own machine as we have seen. 
One product of the activity of this machine is habit. 
In habit the stimulation of the afferent receiver invari- 
ably moves to the same efferent result with automatic 
precision. There is no mentality in it. Such a machine 
is possible only when this cycle is so firmly established 
that this current resists all ordinary counter attractions 
of other channels. It can be established by repetition. 
But there are, "psychologic moments" when intense in- 
terest works the establishment of it at a single shock 
"A burned child dreads the fire." The fact is burned 
into the brain" that fire will burn. The shock of inter- 
est saves time and energy. Be watchful that habits 
carrying the symbol of a meaning, with the meaning 
left out, shall not be formed. It wastes time and be- 
comes a habit of the young mind, which is the cause 
of much greater waste in after life. The besetting sin 
of the school is the storing of words without meaning 
The active presence of cheerfulness and good will 



27 



28 Elementary Education. 

should be the habit of all schools, and has now become 
so in all good schools. 



It is a fact of physiological psychology that pain, 
both physical and psychic, tends to arrest other psychic 
activities. The most paralyzing psychic pain is fear. 
There have been schools in which fear has so prevailed 
that learning was impossible. Indeed fear has greatly 
retarded the progress of the race since the beginning. 
Fear and cheerful enthusiasm never keep company. 
Cheerfulness and enthusiasm are friendly to lively in- 
terest, and these are forms of feeling that act. The es- 
sential of success in teaching is the establishment of 
this active condition in the children. Indeed it is essen- 
tial to the highest success in life. 

Each of us not only makes the machine by which 
we rise from lower to higher attainments, but every 
one is the creator oi his ideals and is himself his own 
director in the pursuit of them. Nine-tenths of one's 
external life is habit, — is machine. But the remaining 
one-tenth is personality, conscious free-will, which di- 
rects the running of the machine. This is a fact self- 
evident to one's consciousness, and it is a fact also of 
physiological psychology, as the neurologist affirms. 
This one-tenth is the thing of infinite importance in 
the discipline of the school. 

The personality is not only free-will and intellect; 
it is feeling which is stronger in directing the life than 
either of these: — feeling as sympathy; as desire; as 
faith; as hope; as love. ''The greatest of these is 



Method of Using the Machine. 29 

love." In a school atmosphere where these prevail ev- 
erything is possible. The personality is a free power 
within the limits imposed by its undeveloped state. We 
call it zvill because it is the source of activity. It makes, 
as we have seen, the machinery by which it acquires 
knowledge and skill, which latter it uses in determin- 
ing what shall be its ideals and purposes in any given 
case, and in realizing these in actual life. Knowledge 
and skill are the instruments which the personality uses 
for the attainment of its desires. Its desires develop 
and strengthen with its education. The environment 
which most interests the personality is most potent in 
determining the person's education. The school selects 
the environment and seeks to interest the growing per- 
sonality in it. The above statements show the series 
of dependencies which the school must recognize. The 
heavy responsibility resting upon the school is thus 
made manifest. 

In saying that the environment determines the edu- 
cation, it is not implied that personality is the product 
of nature viewed as a mechanism, and that one's edu- 
cation is a mechanical process. Within and through 
all nature there is working a creative energy according 
to what is known as the law of evolution. Human per- 
sonality must be thought as a phase of the activity of 
the primal will, which is the source of all things. A 
thing is some Hmited aspect of this primal energy. Ev- 
olution names the process of the becoming of things in 
obedience to a certain order or law resulting in an 
ascending series of things wdiich have a growing com- 
plexity of elements with each higher manifestation of 



30, Elementary Education. 

the primal will. Human personality is the highest num- 
ber of the advancing series of this creative power on 
this planet. It is this will come to consciousness of it- 
self, as a creative power in this stream of evolution, 
and having an impulse to realize the potency within it- 
self for a higher range of freedom. It knows itself as 
a limited power that is creative, and which is not the 
original source of itself. Man is as strongly impelled 
,to the consciousness that God is as that he, himself, 
exists. 

Such a view of creation is called theistic evolution. 
There is an atheistic view of evolution which can but 
have a blasting influence upon the aspirations of any 
soul who really believes it. The theistic view is a pe- 
rennial source of inspiration and joy to the teacher who 
once comes into sympathy with it. 

It may be added that this is a psychological explan- 
ation of man's appearance on the earth and that physio- 
logical psycholog}^ is re-enforcing it by its discoveries. 

The chief reason for presenting this paragraph in 
this connection is to make clear that evolution is funda- 
mentally a psychic or spiritual process. The conviction 
is growing that the process of the universe, what Ten- 
nyson calls ''the process of the suns," is at basis a 
psychic process and must finally be explained by psy- 
chology. 



VL 

Method of Educating the Child. 

Human Personality must educate itself through its 
own self-activity. The school must temper its environ- 
ment to the interests and desires of the child. Not that 
''the teacher must follow the child," but that the child 
must be led along the way of his interests to be inter- 
ested in educative effort. He must desire what educa- 
tion requires that he shall will. His first objective 
work is the learning of words and their uses. Imita- 
tion and imagination name the initial processes. Ar- 
ticulate speech is of the first importance. This is the 
field of the child's first activity. He must learn articu- 
late speech by practicing it. He knows the meaning of 
words before he can utter the words. The words he 
hears are, to him, one with the things he perceives or 
the images he creates of things. He combines these 
images into space- wholes or into events (time- wholes), 
and he is interested in the panorama. He must register 
the words in the Broca library of the brain before he 
can utter them. This requires that the afferent-efferent 
cycles shall be established in one of the two ways sug- 
gested — by a shock of interest or by repetiition. It fol- 
lows that the teacher must be the chief factor in the 
environment during the first years of school life. For- 
tunate are the pupils if she have a musical voice, ready 

31 



32 Elementary Education. 

and accurate speech, quick and responsive imagination, 
genuine affection for the children, and power herself 
to become a little child. Conversation between herself 
and children is her main reliance. Oral speech and 
the aural cycle are the chief center of her effort. 

Here is the opportunity for the child's imagination 
to run free in telling his story with the help of the 
teacher in suggesting words ; for the training of his 
memory in repeating what has been told ; for the en- 
larging of his vision and his vocabulary by stories told 
by the teacher; for stimulating his sense of the beau- 
tiful and elegant in speech in the judicious use of lit- 
erary words ; for helping him to speak with freedom 
by sympathetic attention and assistance when the word 
does not come for the image in his mind. These for 
the active periods of teacher with class. The busy work 
can be training the muscles of the hand to be obedient 
to the will when the time for learning written symbols 
shall come. A sense of freedom of mind and body from 
restraint, within reasonable limits, must be felt by the 
children. 

This is the preliminary schooling for the establish- 
ment of ear-mindedness in the acquisition of English, 
and it is the preliminary of all educational development 
of the personality. 

For eye-mindedness a similar procedure with 
graphic symbols. The spirit and the psychologic method 
of the work in every grade is the same as in the first. 
The details of the working out change with the increas- 
ing power and knowledge of the learner. 



Method of Educating the Child. 33 

The personality is potentially free self-activity 
which manifests itself as a feeling, a creative, and an 
intelligent being. The person does not Ijecome con- 
scious of this difference in manifestation until he is 
well advanced in his education. The early psycholo- 
gists recognized only will and intellect ; feeling being 
regarded as a component of will. The human race has 
risen slowly toward a consciousness of its varied pow- 
ers, and the child repeats to a degree this gradual evolu- 
tion of the race. But he does this through education. 
It, is not an inheritance in any other sense than that 
defined bv Gcethe in the lines : 

"What from your father's heritage is lent 
Karn it anew to really possess it." 

In other words, this inheritance is a potentiality 
rather than an actuality. Education seeks to lead the 
individual to make real this potentiality to the extent, 
at least, that the social order has realized it, and to do 
this in such manner that the individual may rise on 
these stepping stones to still higher things. This need, 
viz., that the individual shall reproduce in himself the 
social order into which he is born, is the ground for a 
definition of education sometimes put forth, as a pro- 
cess of the adjustment of the individual to society. This 
is a statement in the terms of the mechanics of the sen- 
sori-motor cycle of what is really a creative process on 
the part of the learner, but it gives emphasis to a result 
that education must attain. It falls short of a satisfac- 
tory definition in that it seems to make society the goal 
of its endeavor rather than merely a station on the 
road. Personality has for its ultimate goal its harmony 



34 Elementary Education. 

with the universal. An important and essential factor 
in this process is the socializing of oneself. But in this 
socializing stage a growing personality may create 
ideals that are not in harmony with the standard of his 
society. Society advances through the presentation of 
new ideals by its great personalities. It is not always 
true that the whole social order is wiser than any indi- 
vidual member. The average man in the community 
is not the wisest man in that community. When the 
degeneration of a social group sets in, there is ground 
for declaring that for that group, or nation, education 
shall make society as it then is the goal of its endeavor. 

When we proclaim that the process of education is 
a process of adjustment, we must state definitely to 
what the scholar shall be adjusted, if we shall have an 
illuminating definition. 

But it is certainly true that the school must be an 
active and sympathetic factor of its social group. The 
educative stimulus of the school should be in harmony 
with and preparatory to the life- pursuits of the com- 
munity. This is needful to prevent too great estrange- 
ment of the school from the life without. Modern psy- 
chology is not in accord with the monastic theory of 
education. There are relics of this theory still prac- 
ticed in our religion, our educational institutions, and 
in our courts of law and secret orders, but as education 
becomes diffused these will diminish and finally disap- 
pear. Another name for "modernism" is 'Vlemocracy." 
In a true democracy the difference between persons is 
a difTerence in development toward ideal manhood. 



VIL 

Learning from the Printed Page. 

Oral teaching in the first three years of school-Hfe 
slowly fuses with teaching by means of the printed 
page. The zvord-seeing area in the brain is differently 
located from the word-hearing area, but both these 
centers are joined by numerous filaments with the 
Broca cells of oral utterance, and with the writing cen- 
ter. During the first seven years of life the child uses 
the aural area almost exclusively in making and regis- 
tering his vocabulary. The sound of the word and its 
meaning are the same to him, and these tw^o are regis- 
tered as one ; and this continues to be true for the four 
or five succeding years. During this time the child's 
thinking consists of images arranged in space-wholes 
(description), and in events (time- wholes). 

It seems to the teacher an easy thing for the unprac- 
ticed learner to substitute a sight form for the aural 
sound, but it is not. He is ever translating the sight 
form into the sound, but he is not sure to carry the 
meaning along. When he fails to do this he merely 
reads symbols without meanings. 

Because these things are so it is important that the 
child be set to read familiar words until the tendency 
becomes strong to see the meaning in the sight fonn 
as he hears the meaning in the aural form, and so does 

35 



36 Elementary Education. 

not translate it into the sound form to get the meaning. 
In other words, the sight form is fused with the mean- 
ing as sounded. Some people have grown to old age 
without being able to do this. Children generally pre- 
fer ''being read to" long after they can call the words 
at sight, because the word and meaning are more 
closely joined in words they hear than in words they 
see. 

This suggests that much wisdom is required in se- 
lecting readings for children, especially those which are 
used for their cultural value. The writer has often lis- 
tened to the reading of such matter as Emerson's 
"Mountain and the Squirrel" by children from eight to 
ten years of age. The vocal rendering was beyond crit- 
icism in all matters of emphasis, pronunciation, and 
sympathetic tone, but the readers were wholly blind to 
the meaning. This is what the neurologists call mind- 
blindness, caused in this case by making too large de- 
mands upon the child. What he may have vaguely 
understood when the poem was studied with the 
teacher was wholly lost in the ''drill for expression." 
That person is well educated who can read and under- 
stand the books that treat of the different matters that 
interest society. The chief impediment to progress in 
learning from books in our schools, and the principal 
cause of waste, is the fact that the children cannot read 
the text understandingly. A superintendent who was 
for more than forty-five years in charge of the schools 
of one of the growing cities of the central plane, and 
would have continued to be in the front rank of school 
administrators had he lived forty-five years longer, was 



Learning from the Printed Page. 37 

asked how much of the teachers' and the pupils' efforts 
in his schools were waste ? He answered in his laconic 
style, "About half." When this is true of the best 
schools what of the poorest ? 

The leading cause of waste is the simple fact that 
the pupils do not know the meaning of the words. "To 
know a word is to know both its form and its meaning 
by sight and by sound." One must know it in all these 
ways at the same instant to have it properly registered 
in the brain. It appears from this that the command- 
ing purpose of the elementary school is to teach the 
mother tongue; to build up a library of words in the 
word-seeing, the word-hearing, the word-knowing, 
and the word-uttering centers of the brain. 

It is chiefly through words that individuals advance 
in ideals of life, in the purposes for which they strive, 
in the good they do, and in the personal success they 
achieve. Words are the essential instrument by which 
civilization advances and the human race rises toward 
a higher ideal of manhood and womanhood. Let the 
race become suddenly word-blind and deaf and the 
mind blindness of the brute would soon be its portion. 
The word is the instrument by which every personality 
comes to consciousness of himself and becomes con- 
scious of like personalities. Each person creates anew 
for himself this wonderful instrument and through it 
this wonderful world, and it is the school, it is educa- 
tion, that is eventually to rise to an institution that will 
unify and harmonize the different institutions of man. 

It is the commanding function of the elementary 
school to bring the children to know words through the 



38 Elementary Education. 

use of them in practicing love, and high purpose, and 
knowledge ; — love leading to high ideals ; purpose real- 
ized in noble deeds ; and knowledge the director in the 
development of the feelings, the will, and the intellect ; 
which three together make the personality, the self, 
which is potential in every child, and is a purely spirit- 
ual and creative force. 



VIIL 

How Knowledge Begets Knowledge. 
How knowledge can be used as a guide in acquir- 
ing more knowledge is the problem that, up to very 
recent times, has most interested teachers. It is and 
must be the leading purpose of teacher and pupils in 
the school to work at this problem. This is what makes- 
it seem to some to be the commanding purpose of the 
school to train the intellect. Many worthy teachers re- 
gard this auxiliary purpose as the ultimate one, and so 
lose sight of the main object of all educational en- 
deavor. 

But the problem of how to use knowledge to gain 
more knowledge is a most vital one. The problem is 
made more difficult in the school than it would be if 
it could be shaken loose from some entangling alliances. 
The simple problem is : How to make everything the 
child is to learn a problem for him, himself, to solve. 

It is certainly true that the next thing the child 
needs to know in his advance in knowledge suggests his 
problem. By what process can he come into a knowl- 
edge of it? If a child's teaching were ideal from the 
beginning, he would be in possession of all the infor- 
mation needed. In that case he must be guided in 
using it so that what is sought will be revealed by the 
proper marshalling of what he knows. In that case 

39 



40 Elc'iueiitary Education. 

the child might be able to discoA-er what he next needed 
to know and thus set his own problems. 

But life is too short for such method of pursuing 
knowledge under present conditions. The child must 
l^e led by the teacher to discover wdiat he next needs 
to know in his pursuit of knowledge of arithmetic or 
of history (for example), and also what he lacks in 
facts needed to reveal it. These needed facts the 
teacher must give or he must set the pupil on the road 
to finding them. It is for the teacher to determine 
what information he will give the learner directly, and 
wdiat he shall set him to discover for himself, keeping 
in mind that his function is to train the pupil in using 
the knowledge that he has in gaining more knowledge. 
It is by such procedure that the teacher will soonest 
"make himself useless to his scholars." 

In all this it is mcmihigs, the ideas, that the learner 
is considering, and every new idea must have its ap- 
propriate word or words registered in the brain, so that 
it can be ready for use in applying knowledge tO' prac- 
tice, or in acquiring other knowledge. These acquir- 
ing and applying functions of the personality bring into 
operation the reason, the memory, the purpose, the 
heart or ideals, and the knowledge, and every step taken 
is a step in building character. By character is meant 
that fixedness of principle that governs the life. This 
influence upon the personality is vastly more important 
than is the knowledge actually acquired in the process. 
Shall it be a step upward ? That will depend upon the 
promptings of the heart, and the righteousness of the 
purpose in taking the step. Every school problem may 



How Knowledge Begets Knowledge. 41 

be in all its essentials a problem in life — an ethical 
problem. 

It is by such careful, deliberate and systematic ef- 
fort that the personality develops power to acquire and 
apply his knowledge. 



The Commanding Purpose oe the School. 

This leads us to reflection upon the development of 
power as the commanding purpose of the school. The 
child is power in the germ, which may grow or suffer 
arrest according to the influences that direct him during 
the plastic stage. Power grows tO' freedom and self- 
direction through education. It may be arrested in 
part by being confined to a too narrow channel. A 
business man may become only a business man; a 
lawyer, only a lawyer ; a farmer may become a farmer 
and nothing more. Much of the educational talk and 
writing of the present time encourges the conclusion 
that the child while young must begin digging the 
channel in which he is to operate through life. This 
is at bottom the apprentice system of olden times when 
the victim served for seven years and emerged with 
no power outside the groove of his trade. Education 
should teach a vocation, but not until the foundations 
of an intelligent and free manhood and womanhood 
have been laid broad and deep ; as broad and deep as 
the native power of the child enables him to build. 
Human institutions change with changing human 
needs and aspirations. They change slowly because 



42 Elementary Education. 

of the consciousness of the race that the temporary 
need or aspiration of a day may not prove to be the 
need of tomorrow. The pubhc at any one place or 
time is httle more than a grown up child ruled by pres- 
ent impression, or by caprice or passion. The gov- 
erning- institution of man must be the educative insti- 
tution when that shall have attained to its majority. 
It is yet in the formative state. But it will more surely 
become conscious of its true function through a fuller 
knowledge of the nature of the child and of the pro- 
cess of his unfolding. Instead of devoting attention 
exclusively to preparing the child to make a living, 
education must emphasize, as of even greater import- 
ance, the necessity of his becoming a man. There is 
much in the vocations that should come in some form 
into the schools, but they should come there not pri- 
marily for their vocational value but, rather, for their 
educative value. When the limit of their educative 
value is reached, they should be dropped out of the 
curriculum. School education seeks to give under- 
standing of principles and laws, not skill in the appli- 
cation of them. 

Power is something more than the power of intel- 
lect — the power to know and to judge. The Person- 
ality is a creative power, setting up ideals and ends 
and using the intelligence to realize these ends in life 
by the use of knowledge. The personality immerges 
from below in the form of zmll-as-fecling — will-as- 
heart; it is possible for it to attain to the form o! 
heart-as-will, where love is the ruling influence guided 
by intelligence in the attainment of ends. It is prac- 



How Knowledge Begets Knowledge. 43 

ticable for education to lead the personality through 
its development from will (determination) as feeling, 
to love as will. It is falling far short of doing this at 
the present time. Indeed the tendency is the reverse — 
the re-enforcing of the determination (the autocratic 
spirit), and the submerging of the heart. The call for 
education to break this tendency and substitute the 
other is imperative. Not all the educative agencies in 
the social order have, together, so opened a door to 
enter upon this special work of redeeming humanity 
as has the school. 

The wonderful change in the spirit, especially of the 
elementary schools, in the last quarter of the century 
is indicative of the coming reign of love in the educa- 
tive institution. It will beget a change in the com- 
manding purpose for which the school strives. To 
the desire to know there will be added the aspiration 
to do and to be. 

The agencies that are already recognized by edu- 
cation are English, and especially Literature; His- 
tory and Geography in combination; Manual Train- 
ing; and the social life of the school. These can be 
so taught that they shall be a means of grace to every 
child and shall, at the same time, serve as a great in- 
spiration to the personality. Feeling, desire, aspira- 
tion prompt to doing and to the acquisition of knowl- 
edge to direct the doing. It is not until one's educa- 
tion is well advanced that conviction born of knowl- 
edge prompts the will. Those who have reached this 
stage in their development have been the first to de- 
clare that knowledge is power. They declared that 



44 Elementary Education. 

''as a man thinketh so is he." But that is only a part 
of the quotation : "As a man thinketh in his heart 
so is he." Feeling as desire is the beginning of human 
experience, and feeling as love is the final summit of 
human perfection. Then ''men shall be as gods." 
The school makes a fatal mistake when it fails to 
place feeling in the lead in its efforts to stimulate the 
growth of the personality. 

LOFG. 



IX. 

Knowledge the Servant oe the Personalty. 

Knowledge is the objective element in education. 
It is viewed as something other than the self who 
knows. It is that which is common to all intelligence. 
The knowledge that the three angles of a triangle are 
ecjual to two right-angles is the same for every one 
who knows it ; very much as the knowledge of a rose 
is the same to all who look upon it. It is something 
the personality consciously creates for itself and, as 
we have seen, stores the symbols away on library 
shelves in certain convolutions of the brain. The pro- 
cess of this creation is practically the same for all. 

But there is a self, a power, that does this, which 
feels itself to be the subject, the source of these crea- 
ations ; it is this subjective self that is the source of all 
power. In the child it is in its incipient stage of 
will and feeling. Education is to develop this germ 
through exercise, by reaction upon the stimulus sup- 
plied by the environment. This reaction is the same 
in kind, whether it be mechanical or spiritual. A blow 
stimulates a blow in return ; love stimulates love ; an- 
ger begets anger. 

The child's environment in school is both physical 
and spiritual. His chief spiritual environment is the 
teacher and the other children. They are the active 

45 



46 Elementary Education. 

influences that make the physical environment effect- 
ive. They awaken desire, appreciation, interest, com- 
prehension, purpose either agreeable or disagreeable, 
positive or negative, elevating or depressing, helpful 
or harmful, better or worse. 

The out of school life is a conglomerate of helpful 
and harmful influences of the environment. The school 
seeks to be only helpful. This calls for a selection of 
environment — the ''Course of Study," — and the so or- 
dering of the presentation of it that it will tend to an 
orderly reaction of the learner. It is because of the 
importance of these two functions of the school — the 
selection of the environment, and the learner's orderly 
reaction upon it — that the school will eventually rise 
to an institution of acknowledged dignity and influ- 
ence in the social order. We all acknowledge the com- 
manding need of the attention that is now being given 
to all intelligent communities, to the kindergarten and 
primary school. 

But the environment and its ordering which is de- 
manded there, must be continued with like intelligence 
throughout the school course. There is no grade 
where scholarship, intelligence, heart, skill, and cre- 
ative power, are less essential than they are m the pri- 
mary school and kindergarten. Indeed, if there is 
any difference it is probably true that there is an in- 
creasing need of these things from the primary school 
to the end of the university course. Their weakness 
or absence is not so fatal in higher education, for there 
the student is better able to care for himself and choose 
between efficient and inefficient instruction. 



Knoirlcdtje ihc Servant of ilie rcrsonalUy. 



47 



There are two kinds of power : 

1. Spiritual power; which constructs and puts in 
order a subjective world which is to be realized ex- 
ternally. 

2. Physical power; which realizes in the object- 
ive world wdiat is ordered by the personality. 

The school seeks to develop both of these kinds of 
power. Both of these are used together in the com- 
petent teaching of Manual Training, Drawing, Phys- 
ical Culture, Penmanship, Music, Conversation, Dra- 
matic action, and Oratory. 

Spiritual power with its creations is especially de- 
veloped and disciplined by systematic study of Mathe- 
matics, the Natural Sciences, History, Literature, Eth- 
ics, Religion, Philosophy, Psychology, and all consid- 
erations of causes. 

In the development of physical power there is a 
constant activity of the afferent-efferent, or sensori- 
motor cycle. From this fact seems to have arisen the 
dogma that nothing is known until it is realized in an 
external deed. It is probable that a motor-cycle of 
some kind attends every judgment, but spiritual power, 
which is the source of all physical power, is certainly 
not limited in its activity to physical manifestation of 
itself in motion — in external deeds. 

An aspiration and a resolve are not wasted energy 
of the spirit merely because they are never realized in 
external act. There is a reaction upon the self that 
strengthens. That psycho-sensory cycle may be closed 
without the excitation of a muscle. In some way the 



48 Elementary Education. 

personality has its experience and power grows 
thereby. 

y But in childhood it is of great educative value that 
spiritual aspirations culminate in deeds, and the en- 
vironment shou4d press the learner to such fulfillment 
to the degree that is practicable. Habit is as valuable 
in the psychic cycle as in the sensori-motor ; and the 
latter helps to establish the former. 

Notwithstanding the immense influence of educa- 
tive environment in promoting the development of 
heart, and power, and knowledge, this influence does 
not act with that mechanical certainty and precision 
which belongs to the sensori-motor cycle. In this lat- 
ter a given stimulus of the afferent nei*ve always 
causes the efferent nerve to act in the same way. A 
fixed amount of stimulus will always produce a like 
result. This is not true in the education of a person- 
ality. Whatever the influence of the environment, the 
self may react sometimes in one way or sometimes in 
another; or it may remain indifferent and passive to 
the influence. In other words every person has a de- 
gree of freedom to direct his activity as he may will. 
It is certain that the best school environment will be 
powerless to produce results so long as the will, the 
self, shall determine differently. Nor can the worst 
influences produce results wdien the will sets itself 
against them. The hope of the teacher rests ultimately 
in the conviction that every personality is by nature 
good and not bad ; divine rather than demonic ; and 
that it is possible to so strengthen by education the 
impulse of the soul for good that it will resist those 



Knowledge the Ser-vant of the Personality. 49 

instincts and passions which have been bequeathed to 
it by its animal ancestors. A child is incapable of sin 
until it has attained to that degree of consciousness 
which really knows the better way but chooses the 
worse. 

He can choose w^orse because he is a personality; 
because he is free-will. This free-will must be re- 
spected by his teachers, for the child must himself 
achieve his freedom in order to possess it. Indeed 
the supreme power must respect this free-will, if the 
growing will shall ever come into its inheritance of 
freedom. 



X 



SUMMARY. 

The purpose of this introduction has been to 
strengthen the conviction of the reader that the com- 
manding function of the school is to increase the de- 
sire, power, and knowledge, of learners in the pursuit 
of those things that make for a high order of man- 
hood and womanhood, and especially to call attention 
to some contributions that science has made to our 
knowledge of the mutual relations of the physiological 
and psychological natures in man. Physiologically 
man is a mechanism and that only. Psychologically 
he is a personality, in which creative power as will is 
fused (so to speak) with feeling, the two being differ- 
ent aspects of the one self or person. The function of 
feeling is that of a stimulant to action. 

Personality is the peculiar endowment of man. It 
is the free agent which uses the body as the instrument 
for its own ends. Because it is free it is responsible 
for the ends its seeks. Its commanding impulse or de- 
sire is to promote its own good. It must learn through 
education what its good is. Man falls short of the 
glory of manhood not so much in his will to achieve his 
good as in his ignorance of what is his real good. 
Knowledge is not an inheritance from our fathers. One 
must earn it for himself. But society has advanced 

50 



Summary. 51 

so far as to provide that the young shall not be left 
to themselves in their search for this good. The race 
has been seeking it for ages and something has been 
learned which has been recorded in books and in hu- 
man institutions. It is the function of the school to 
select from this mass of accumulated experience those 
things which have been pronounced good by the world, 
and organize them into an environment — a systematic 
course of training. This will contain the best results 
of the experience of the race, and should be adapted 
to the progressive stages of development of the learner. 
This statement holds good from the kindergarten to 
the university. 

But the school environment contains other things 
than the dead results in knowledge of those who have 
gone before. Something is established in the minds of 
ment that we call the ideals, the aims of life, which 
make it worth living. This is of more importance than 
knowledge, but it cannot be realized except through 
knowledge. It is of as much greater value than knowl- 
edge as character is of more worth than mere knowing 
what is best. It is the cultivation of power that results 
in character. Character may be positive or negative, 
good or bad, according as the will as desire, the per- 
sonality, becomes principled in the good or in the bad. 
To know better and do worse is sin. It is a denial of 
the good. 

The school must seek to promote results in charac- 
ter which the race has pronounced good. Good as here 
used has a wider application than obedience to duty for 
conscience sake, but it includes that. 



52 Elementary Education. 

The sort of adjustment of the child to life which 
the school must seek must be an adjustment to the life 
which he thinks in his heart is good ; to his ideal of 
life. 

It may be a new doctrine to the reader which de- 
clares that the will, the personality, is master of his own 
thinking machine. When the mind, the knowing activ- 
ity, is not in the grip of the will but is left tO' itself, it 
is subject to the sensori-motor cycle which plays upon 
it with every passing object of sense. It flies hither 
and thither forming disconnected judgments suggested 
by the afferent stimulus which is as varied as the ob- 
jects that attack the perceptive senses. The mind is 
now at play, as it were. It is not responsible for its 
thoughts. They are what the play of its senses dictate. 
Responsibility for thoughts comes when the personality 
says to them "Remain; I have use for you." This 
latter is purposive thinking. It is by purposive thinking 
that the personality becomes disciplined to think true. 
It is purposive thinking that gives increase of power; 
the higher the purpose, the greater the power. 

Persistent thinking to a purpose is not easy, for the 
mind is now acting under the lash of the will. The 
will is moved to persist in its demands upon the mental 
area of the brain by its interest in its purpose. So we 
have come again to the point of contact between the 
mind of the learner and the object to be learned, viz., 
the interested will, or will-as-desire. "Nothing so 
grows in power by use as the will, and nothing weak- 
ens so rapidly by non-use as the will." So long as the 
personality is an interested, purposive will, hospitable 



Summary. 53 

to new ideas for the light they may throw upon the 
path of his purpose, so long the personality remains 
young. We grow old when we are no longer inter- 
ested in solving new problems, and in gathering knowl- 
edge needed for their solution. To keep young is to 
keep growing. The brain becomes less plastic with 
age, (See ''Brain and Personality," page 274), to be 
sure, and it is not so easy to register new words in 
the Broca library, but the proverb remains true : "The 
old for council and the young for battle." 

In this introduction mention has been made only of 
one class of objects, viz., objects of sense and the 
images oi those objects. These are objects which the 
personality creates for itself in response to its physical 
environment. They are viewed as objects other than 
the self who regards them. The study of the relations 
of these results is what we may term objective knowl- 
edge. As was said early in this introduction, this is the 
only class of objects that interest children of the ele- 
mentary and high school age — with rare exceptions in 
the high school and still rarer in the elementary school. 
But man does not become fully self-conscious and free 
in the use of his powers until he discovers his part in 
the creation that so interests him, and how large a fac- 
tor he himself is in that world of spirit which is the 
source not only of this world of sense, but of that 
vaster world in which the fully self-conscious man lives, 
and moves, and has his true being. It is not, however, 
the province of education as an elementary school dis- 
cipline to attempt to lift this veil. That belongs rather 
to the all-embracing, all-sided institution of social life. 



54 Elementary Educatioii. 

The personality has passed his novitiate in the prepara- 
tory disciphne of the educative institutions in which he 
follows a leader. It is when he comes to know himself 
that he is ready to lead himself. But he must achieve 
freedom through the regulated exercise of his free-will. 
The next Part of this investigation would be given 
to a presentation, in some detail, of the use which 
the school can make of its environment — the course of 
study — to stimulate the child's growth in power and 
knowledge. Such a section will have merely a sug- 
gestive value to those who shall have mastered the 
train of thought of this introduction and what it im- 
plies. When the teacher knows that the child is free- 
will in the germ, and that it is the nature of this germ 
to work for the realization of its freedom in actual life; 
and when he knows that the school environment of the 
child must be so selected and manipulated that it will 
supply the proper stimulus for each stage of his ad- 
vancement ; and when he has become familiar with the 
child's active powers, and is w-illing to wait on those 
that are not yet active until they have emerged; and 
wdien he sees that knowledge and power cannot be im- 
parted by him to the child but must be acquired through 
the child's self-activity, the impulses of which must be 
respected, but, also, directed; and when he really 
''thinks in his heart" that the children must work with 
joy in their hearts at what they are set to do; and, last 
and most important of all, when it has become to him 
self evident — true beyond all doubt — that no really edu- 
cative work can be done unless the will is interested in 
understanding it at every successive step in the pursuit 



Summary. 55 

of the knowledge sought — that purposive will free from 
every suggestion of fear is the essential condition of 
such understanding; then the teacher thus equipped, 
who is himself a purposive will, is beyond all need of 
help. He has already made any teacher useless to him- 
self. 

But a second Part that shall show the application 
to elementary schools of what is set forth as doctrine in 
this introduction ought to be helpful to teachers not so 
thoroughly equipped. The application to high schools 
would require still another Part. 



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